Originally Posted by
Franklin27
Thanks for replying, Taras. I have been training with the Up-Up book and there advices to have under-geared 500m efforts before the strength work intervals during the same session.
In your opinion, should be the under-geared sprints before or after the strength intervals?
Edit: Thanks for your wisdom in this forum (overall in the Weigthlifting post). Your contributions are pure gold.
Before, but ideally in separate workouts (if you're looking to max out with each one).
Strength is a component of power (power = force x speed, sort of). You need to be well rested to have a productive speed workout. You can grind out a strength workout as long as you have enough recovery between sets. As the workout goes on, you may be able to produce the same amount of force, but the rate at which you produce it goes down. This is okay in a strength workout, but not ideal. You NEVER want to allow this in a speed or power workout. If you train slow contractions, guess what your muscles will learn to do, contract slowly. This is why I wouldn't necessarily follow undergeared work with strength work. You can use undergear work as a "warm-up" to potentiate or prime the muscles to contract quickly IF the strength workout is primary workout in the session. The body will adapt to the greater stressor, so just keep in mind the purpose of that specific workout, and go through it accordingly.
When doing a speed/undergeared workout, you always stop as soon as the rate of work slows down. You can set yourself back a workout or two by not adhering to this principle.
On the flip side of potentiation, you can also use strength to prime power/speed. Get the body to generate a huge force, then remove some resistance when you want to apply speed. Donovan Bailey and Bruny Surin were doing single sets of ~600lb squats in their warm-up to running the 100m relay in Atlanta in '96. The secret is NOT MAXING OUT, and not cooking yourself with reps.